Somewhere on every news site you'll find a notice extolling the publisher's commitment to accuracy: Corrections are welcome and errors are promptly fixed, it says, in so many words. Sounds swell. But if publishers were as welcoming and as prompt as they say they are, why would Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg and Knight News Challenge panelists see so much opportunity in a news corrections clearinghouse?

The Knight Foundation gave Rosenberg's startup MediaBugs $335,000 to solve a problem news organizations should be handling themselves. Currently focused on the San Francisco media market but planning an expansion in the coming weeks, MediaBugs solicits "specific, correctable errors" from news consumers, communicates what it sees as actionable mistakes to the organizations that published them and chronicles the entire process on its website.

Now, by filtering error reports, compiling corrections data, sharing widgets and source code and advocating for civil correspondence among stakeholders, MediaBugs does more than just pass along complaints from users to publishers. But passing complaints from users to publishers is its main gig. (MediaBugs, for the record, deals with all mediums, print, broadcast and online.)

Why can't news orgs do this themselves?

Why do I feel like "The Bobs" in Office Space? You know the scene. The one where the two same-name consultants interrogated Tom Smykowski over why Initech needed him to take specifications from customers. Why, they demanded, couldn't the engineers just do it themselves?

Well, why can't news organizations properly process error complaints themselves? (The answer is kind of like Tom's answer: News orgs, like Initech's engineers, in a sense, exhibit poor people skills.)

While MediaBugs' streamlined system makes managing corrections more efficient, technology is not the fundamental barrier here. There's no reason a newsroom committed to the task can't effectively execute it with a simple PHP interface or with a dedicated e-mail account with a few customized rules and folders.

The fundamental barrier is an uptight, insular culture that resists the kind of transparency it demands of others. This doesn't describe all news organizations, of course, but judging by the attention MediaBugs has received and its accounts of its interactions with media outlets, it describes too many of them.

Institutionalism's unintended consequences

Ironically, the institutional framework that some news organizations claim makes them more accountable than some dude blogging from his bedroom (hey, that's me!), can in fact make them less accountable. A former Bloomberg journalist, for example, suggested to MediaBugs that the business news service's "personnel policies came down so hard on employees who made errors that they were reluctant to admit them at all."

While the opportunity to improve the quality of their journalism should alone be enough to move news organizations toward an as-open-as-possible culture, there are plenty of other incentives.

Truly welcoming, truly prompt attention to user feedback humanizes journalists and the journalistic process. It shows sources and audience members that, no matter what their paranoid fantasies tell them, journalists don't willfully publish lies to settle personal vendettas or to serve some centralized media agenda. It shows that journalists in fact hate, hate, hate making mistakes, even comparatively minor ones that sources are content to laugh off.

A direct line to the coveted engaged user

Moreover, a responsive error management system puts news organizations directly in touch with the most coveted kind of user: An engaged one. Think about it: Someone who reports a mistake was not only paying close enough attention to notice it but also cared enough to tell the media outlet about it.

He or she might have some other thoughts the news organization would be interested in hearing, thoughts he or she might not mention to third parties like MediaBugs or thoughts such third parties, unfamiliar with the outlet's brand and coverage area, might misinterpret or dismiss as unimportant.

Whether it's part of their official job description or not, today, all journalists are in the customer service business. They all serve the communities they report on. New tools make it both harder to hide from this responsibility and easier to fulfill it.

We welcome your feedback!

Again, I realize there must be many news organizations who do an exemplary job managing corrections online, and I'd love to highlight some of them in a future post. So, let us know: What outlets do corrections well?

Oh, to report an error in this post or in any others of ours, e-mail us, @ reply or DM us on Twitter or let us know in the comments. We welcome corrections and will fix errors fast, promise.